mmmmm I'm REALLY sorry it has taken this long to update. I've kinda fallen into a pit of uselessness and procrastination (mixed in with university and responsibilities), which is why I haven't updated in six months, and I feel kinda bad about it because I love to write and I do know where I want to take this fanfic in general, so as long as I have that idea clear in my mind, I won't ever abandon this fic, so you don't have to worry about that
Chapter Three: Soldier
The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Are you okay?
You look a little pale.
Is it my fault?
It is, isn't it.
I'm sorry.
Anzu.
A lifeless girl stirred to life, her body sore and her dormant face coated by dust. She felt like she had been out for a while; her limbs ached like they had been unused for years. It smelled like rotting meat and manure in the dark room, and the scent lingered around her face like a rancid scarf.
Holding out her hands for guidance, Anzu got to her knees and rotated her head slowly, like a camera scanning the area around her, allowing her drowsy eyes to adjust to the darkness. It was eerily dark, however; something about it seemed very surreal. It was like someone had sucked all of the light out of the atmosphere. If she didn't know any better, she would think she had gone blind.
She stared into the abyss and the abyss looked back into her with beady crimson eyes, microscopic ruby shards, shimmering by some ethereal light.
After a couple of fruitless minutes of trying to detect objects in the solid darkness around her, she decided to look around using her hands rather than her eyes. She tried as hard as she could to push the goosebumps and the fear trickling out of every pore on her body to the back of her mind. She wasn't very fond of the dark...
Her hands danced around the darkness, invisible and quick, searching frantically for something real to cling to. It didn't take long for skin to find wood and her hands rested hesitantly on a rough plane elevated less than a meter above the ground. A chair? Her fingers glided over it, while she made mental notes of the object's dimensions. No, a table... a very small one though.
A soft rustling, amplified tenfold, told Anzu that the room was not too big and closed. It was hard to say where the door was, or whether or not there were windows. She figured there must not have been any windows at all because it was so dark, and it sent tiny impulses to the hairs on her neck and arms. Tremors rumbled from the cores of her bones to her paper white skin.
The desire to leave beat rhythmically against her chest, the only sound in the dead silence. She didn't want to say a word and shatter the iron curtain that had settled over the room. Any rash actions could very well endanger her, so it would be best if she adopted a quiet approach.
Clinging to the table for support, she crouched down to the ground, deducing that if she walked in a straight line along the cracks in the wood, she would eventually reach a wall, and if she was lucky, a door. When her hands met the floor, she felt something sticky rub off on her fingers, residue of something foul smelling and rotten. Tentatively, she put her finger on the crack and pushed away from the table, inching slowly away from it until the sticky substance was no longer beneath her.
There was more shuffling and a distant knock, which rattled the girl and froze her legs. Those sounds were likely made by her captors, she thought as she extended her arm in front of her to realize that she had finally reached the wall she had been seeking. It felt worn and almost… moist. As a matter of fact, the whole room was humid and putrid. She felt like she was in the middle of a garbage dump full of rotten food.
She felt up along the wall as she rose to her feet. At a height of around one meter, the rotten wood became damaged glass, and although she could tell there was something on the other side, she wouldn't dare put her hand through one of the gaps, and however hard she tried, she couldn't see through it either. It must have been very dark outside of the room as well. Why on earth would they keep it so dark in this place?
Edging along the wall, Anzu finally found what she was looking for: a door handle protruding from the wall. It was an old sliding door, and she hoped that it hadn't rusted shut with all the humidity in the room. She tugged the handle with all her might, using her body's weight to help. As she feared, it seemed to have rusted quite a bit, judging by the metallic creaking it gave when she tried to open it. However, it did show signs that it was movable, so she tried once more, wiggling it a bit in its track and hoping to shake off some of the rust that had gathered. After a bit more effort, she had finally gotten the old wheels to turn and the door to slide open ever so slightly.
She moved towards the crack to glance outside, finding it considerably brighter. It was still dark, but she could see a dull overhead light flickering on and off, casting shadows all around. She could also see that the floor was damaged on the other side of the door, filled with gaps and cracks. It certainly didn't look safe, so she would have to be careful once she got out.
Her hands were now back on the handle, dragging the door open, which was much easier than it had been before, but it still sent trails of perspiration down her forehead.
She had wanted to be quiet earlier, but the loud screech of the door was making it harder than she anticipated. Still, she had no choice. If she wanted to get out, she was going to have to open the door and deal with the consequences later.
As soon as the screeching came to a halt, Anzu heard a soft moaning. "Mmh…Who's there?"
The girl turned around, scanning the room that she had been with the little light she had finally shed, and still, she couldn't see the source of the voice. Her heart was caught in her throat, making it difficult to breathe, let alone speak. Whoever spoke was obviously still in the dark parts of the room, and whoever it was had certainly been there the whole time she was struggling to find a way out. It terrified her that she had been in that darkness for so long without knowing what lurked within it.
"A-Anzu… is that you?"
Her name.
"Anzu, please help me. My leg is stuck…"
Wait… And through the tightness in her chest, her voice leaked out, weakly and shakily. "Shizuka?"
"Yeah…" This voice just may have been weaker than her own, but Anzu could say with approximate certainty -or at least enough approximate certainty to send her back into the realm of darkness that was before her -that this voice belonged to her friend. "I'm stuck. Please come quickly. I can't see anything."
Though Anzu wasn't too keen on going back inside, the light from outside made it a bit easier to gather the courage for Shizuka's sake. She moved cautiously, her eyes straining to locate holes and obstacles that the light shone on. She realized, as she navigated a path towards the sound of her friend's voice, that she was lucky she hadn't fallen victim to one of those holes in the dark while she had been searching for the door.
"S-Stay calm, Shizuka. I'm coming." Her approach was slower than she would have liked, but then again, she could neither see Shizuka nor the ground. She stopped for a moment and decided to speak to Shizuka. "Can you see me right now?" she asked. Of course, it was pitch black in the room and Shizuka had already said that she couldn't see anything, but she could still tell that the other person in the room was Anzu in spite of that, so perhaps the redhead could see silhouettes. It would certainly help if she could; perhaps she could lead Anzu in the right direction.
After faltering for a short period of time, Shizuka finally replied, "I can… but only a little bit. It was easier to see you when you were by the door."
"I can imagine," Anzu replied airily. "Don't worry, sweetie. I'll get out out of here. Just let me know if I'm going the right way because I can't make heads or tails of this darkness."
"Alright," the younger girl said, her voice accented by distant knocks and thuds. Something strange was going on in this place, and Anzu didn't like the idea of sticking around this room any longer if she could avoid it.
Anzu's short party dress was clinging to her legs as she eased her way closer to her friend, listening closely to her guidance. There were more small tables like the ones she had touched earlier, and as she made her way past them, she realized that they weren't tables, but desks, with tiny chairs scattered around. This must have been some sort of elementary school.
"You're almost there, Anzu. Just a few more steps…"
Before the older girl could take her final steps, she felt her right foot drop on something slightly elevated. Tentatively, she moved her foot on the object, trying to identify it. It wasn't a chair, because whatever it was seemed to be cushioned by something. However, she was unable to match the feel of the object with something she knew based only on touch. She couldn't see what it was, because at that moment, the only thing she actually could see was the door that she had left open; yet she could tell that whatever was on the ground there was letting out an awful stench.
"Is something wrong?"
"I don't know… There's something on the ground here."
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Each of the overhead lights turned on with a sound that started the two girls into an inanimate state. The blood in their arteries was frozen solid and their eyes fixed on one particular object in the newly, but dimly, lit room.
Lying in a pool of pure crimson was something entirely unrecognizable. It was a red and white mass of something meaty and covered in maggots. They squirmed around trying to get their fill, poking in and out of small holes and crevices, like sack of rice splitting at the seams.
Anzu soon came to the realization that she still had her foot firmly on the object, placed squarely in the center of the fleshy mass, surrounded by a swirling vortex of crawling insects. She could feel something inside her loafers, tickling her ankle and calf -tens of maggots climbing her pale dirt-stained leg. She felt her leg go numb, as though the presence of maggots on the limb caused her whole body to disown the offending appendage. She felt frozen, unable to move away, in spite of her body absolutely pleading to her. Eventually, she lost her balance and dropped onto her bottom.
"Anzu!" Shizuka cried out, her doe eyes wide and frightened. She wanted to get up and assist her friend, but in her situation, it was impossible for her to stand up.
The older girl edged away from the ruby red, glistening mass, feeling her dress snag against the damaged floorboards. She lifted her right leg as much as she could before slamming it down on the hard ground, trying to expel the bugs that were making their ascent. It hit the ground with a loud, unsettling THUD.
The first time, several of them dropped to the ground. Inching away from the maggots, she let out a dropped her foot once more upon the ground and subsequently, she shook the leg, trying to get them all off of her. As soon as she determined that the maggots were all gone, she shakily got to her feet, watching the creatures scurry around her.
Scratch, scratch, scratch...
With the panic of the maggots alleviated, the girls could finally hear the noise. It was a mix between chalk tapping furiously against a chalkboard and fingernails on wood, and it didn't take them long to find the source -a chalkboard on the other side of the room. It looked like someone that they couldn't see was furiously writing on the board in bright red. Could it be blood?
You betrayed us.
You betrayed us.
You betrayed us.
You betrayed us.
You betrayed us.
The writing was erratic and not always clear, but the girls knew for sure that the same sentence was being written repeatedly on the chalkboard like some kind of twisted punishment in an after-school detention session. Whatever was being used to write was sliding down the chalkboard in messy trails, and they could tell that the writer was obviously unstable and possibly dangerous.
They had to get out of that room quickly. Anzu just knew it. Her head was throbbing, and she didn't know whether it was the heavy and suffocating atmosphere or whether it was the tapping on the chalkboard, which was so loud that she was surprised the board was still in one piece. Trying to ignore the pain, she made her way over to Shizuka, avoiding the unidentifiable bloody mass on the floor to get to her destination.
The younger girl was trapped in the corner of the room, sitting in an extremely uncomfortable looking position with one leg extended in front of her and the other completely out of sight. Her hands were placed firmly on the ground on either side of her, supporting the awkward position. "Anzu, please -" the girl started to speak, but Anzu put a finger to her lips sternly, her eyes flitting to the furious ghost writer at the front of the room.
When Anzu was finally crouching beside her friend, she discovered the reason behind the girl's inability to move. It was not that her second leg was out of sight; rather, the whole leg up to the thigh was stuck inside one of the many holes scattered around the room. She seemed to be in pain with the edges of the boards digging into her pale skin. The brunette let out an anxious sigh. This sure was a difficult position.
First, she gestured quietly for Shizuka to wrap her arms around the elder's neck, which the girl obeyed without question. After that, Anzu gripped the girl's waist tightly, lifting the young teenager up, only to hear a quiet whimper. It seems the wood was digging into her skin too deeply to simply pull her out. Anzu had the fleeting thought that they were running out of time. She didn't know how she could tell, but she had a feeling that as soon as the ghost writer's space ran out, she and Shizuka wouldn't be safe anymore. The scratching was making her feel nauseous. She had to hurry.
Slowly, she sat the younger girl back down and worked on breaking the weathered wood below. It didn't seem like it would put up much of a fight so, mustering up all of her physical strength, she wrapped her fingers around the thinnest of the jagged edges piercing her friend. She started to tug, hearing the satisfying creak of wood and hoping that her strength was enough to break it off. Fortunately, it only took about a minute for the piece to break off with a loud snap.
Her head turned quickly to see if the noise had at all affected the ghost writer, but they seemed to be unaware of anything in the room other than the mysterious person who had betrayed them. This caused Anzu to let out a sigh of relief, but it was only slight, because the writer was nearly finished with the chalkboard.
"C'mon," Anzu mouthed to Shizuka, and the girl immediately grabbed her friend's neck. Anzu began to carry Shizuka up again. She could feel resistance, but the other girl remained silent, which the older girl took as permission to continue to pull.
You bETRAYED US.
YOU BETRAYED US.
YOU BETRAYED US.
YOU BETRAYED US.
YOU BETRAYED US.
The writing seemed to be more agitated as the phantom went lower on the blackboard. However, neither of the corporeal girls wanted to see the room on the chalkboard run out. The phantom was standing next to the door that Anzu had previously opened, but to their great fortune, this room had a second door that was much closer to the girls as well as much farther from the ghost.
The two girls rushed over to the door, Shizuka still holding onto Anzu in a panic. The older girl grabbed the handle to the door, watching as it slid open with more ease than the other door. And as the redhead was making her way through the door, she was distracted by the sound of nails on a chalkboard. A quick glance showed her what seemed to be an invisible nail carving into the board and the blood rearranging itself and filling in the scratches caused by the invisible nail.
I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU, CHIE.
Shizuka felt herself being tugged out of the room by her arm and promptly exited the room. She made to shut the door, but with a loud SLAM, the door slid shut of its own accord, leaving the two girls in a dimly lit hallway with the floorboards to their right completely decimated, while the ones to their left looked dangerous, but considerably more passable.
Before taking another step, the girls decided to take the opportunity to speak to each other. The first to open her mouth was Anzu. "What was that?" She was still panting in fear and exertion. Her hand was still aching from when she broke the wood, and she could feel a splinter in her palm that she didn't want to remove for fear that she would push it deeper into her skin as it was hard to see clearly in the light that this hall provided.
"I don't know…" Shizuka murmured, her eyes still on the door. Was any of what they saw in there real? Could it possibly be real? They both saw the same thing, though, so how could it be a hallucination?
"Well," Anzu said, glancing to the left and to the right. There wasn't much of a choice in where to go from that point, so, taking a step to the left, she told her friend, "I guess we'd better get going. We need to find our friends."
The younger girl looked down at the ground, her eyes trying to find courage in the floorboards, but the only thing to be found was despair. She wasn't keen on leaving that spot as there was no telling what could be lurking around this place. Her eyes wandered to the door they had just emerged from. "I don't think I could stay near this door any longer… What if… whatever's in there comes out?"
Anzu nodded, her mahogany bob swaying lightly with her head. "So let's go!"
The hallway was brittle and broken, giving off an air of dread and hopelessness. As the girls walked, they could feel their spirits tugged down into the ground by some unseen force, like the heaviness in the atmosphere could really drain away their hope. The walls reeked of death and decay, and the girls didn't even have the heart to question it.
It didn't take them much longer to come to the conclusion that they were wandering in an old school, but from what they could see, it was more like a graveyard -a hell of some sort. It didn't take them long to find another dead body, and another, and another… like gaudy decorations at an amusement park, and Anzu could tell that her companion was losing heart and mind with each face, no matter how deformed. Each name tag brought out a whimper or a shudder, and as much as Shizuka tried to hide it, there was no doubting the dread and fear she felt.
It was the body of a middle-schooler by the name of "Makoto Sato" that caused her weak knees to finally give out beneath her. Shizuka's small body quaked in the lonely hallway; her eyes wide open, but seeing only blurs of dull colors. There was no difference anymore between the brown of the dirty bones, the brown of the dry blood and the brown of the filthy rotting wood. However, she wasn't crying, because to cry was to accept that she was truly and undeniably trekking through a school of corpses, and judging by the way she walked through the school like a fairy tiptoeing on air, she still believed that she was having an endlessly long and taxing nightmare.
Anzu, whose gentle blue eyes had witnessed many things -none this horrific, but just as many - put a shaking hand on her friend's shoulder. She couldn't say anything to her because there were simply no words for what they were going through. "W-We… we need to find the exit, Shizuka…"
Hearing those words seemed to jump start something in the younger girl's body and it jerked abruptly. She set her hands down on the ground and began to stand up, dusting herself off and running a nervous hand through her hair. "I'm fine," she said. "I'm fine…" Her voice cracked slightly, her words were laced with annoyance, but it seemed more at herself than at Anzu.
The older girl suspected that those words were untrue, but as long as Shizuka could continue on this demonic place, even for just a few more minutes, Anzu had to let her. Shizuka, for as long as Anzu could remember, greatly valued being more of a help than an inconvenience, and as long as that was still true about her, it meant that she was still normal and that the maddening sights hadn't stolen away her mind.
As they encountered locked door after locked door, Anzu had taken to reading the notes on the floor, keeping their words to herself. Shizuka, however, only had eyes for the notes on the walls. Each were maddening in a way, and each girl had already chosen which madness they wanted to afflict their souls.
"'Whoever keeps stealing shoes from the entranceway will be found and punished severely…'" Shizuka mumbled to herself. Standing before the entranceway, surrounded by tiny shoes, she couldn't help but feel like the guilt in that note was enveloping her. It was almost as though she were the shoe thief… She suddenly felt very anxious to get out of that place and took a step in the opposite direction of the entrance, towards a long hallway.
"Shizuka, that's the entrance…" Anzu informed her. "We can finally get out of here!"
However, the red haired girl simply shook her head fiercely. "N-No... I have a bad feeling about it…"
"What kind of bad feeling?" Anzu asked, trying to shake off the tremors that Shizuka's statement had invoked. "I know none of the doors we found actually opened, but what's the harm in trying this one?"
"That's the thing, Anzu!" Shizuka cried out in a voice so soft and hesitant that, were it not for the dead silence and the unnerving echoes, Anzu wouldn't have heard her. "I think this door might actually open."
"I-I-I… I don't understand," the brunette replied. Shizuka's terror was emanating from her like an aura and its reach enshrouded Anzu, seeping into her skin and knocking on her heart, an uninvited visitor. "It's fine!" Proving a point more to herself than to her companion, she started with heavy steps towards the double doors of the entranceway.
"P-Please! Anzu, don't!" This pleading voice went unheard by Anzu, her mind electing to remain positive contrary to all reason… No, wasn't it reason that told them that all doors needed to be checked, in spite of an ominous hunch?
Anzu's hands clutched the worn wood of the door and began to pull it to the side, putting all of her weight into opening it. It was almost rusted shut, however, unlike the other doors they had encountered, this one showed promise and the prospect of actually opening.
With a noisy screech, the door was finally open. Anzu stood just before the railing, with her hand on the doorway like an explorer staring down into the unknown. She twisted herself to look at Shizuka, who was maintaining a safe distance from the door and shivering. "Well? Come on."
With a shaky nod, the young girl obeyed and scurried over to her friend. Of course, in a place like this, she wasn't too keen on getting separated from a familiar face. "Please, Anzu…" She tried once again to beg her friend. "Let's just go... I don't like this…"
This time, Anzu didn't reply, dismissing her friend with a small smile. She let go of the doorway and took a step inside. The air felt different in that room, but she paid it no mind as her eyes had spotted the front door of the school. She could see the night sky through the window. She could see trees in the distance with a bright full moon above them. She dashed towards it, Shizuka's wide eyes following her from the doorway.
"I hope this opens…" she said under her breath as she gripped the door, struggling to get it open. Maybe it was just difficult like the previous door… "Come on, Shizuka! Help me with this!"
Reluctantly, Shizuka began to close the distance between herself and the door. However, she didn't expect her path to close and her friend to disappear.
The door snapped shut aggressively, causing the walls around it to shake slightly and the young girl before it to let out a yelp which echoed all around the hall. She leapt to the door, pulling on it desperately, but in the short time it had closed, it seemed like it became nothing more than a decoration. She shook it with all her might. Perhaps if she broke it, she could reach her friend, but the wood was terribly strong, and at that moment, Shizuka felt terribly weak.
"Anzu!" she screamed at the door. "Anzu are you okay?"
Muffled and anxious, but otherwise unstrained, a voice yelled back at her. "I'm fine! But I can't open the door!"
"Wh-What about the front door?" she asked her friend, a slight sense of relief lighting a candle in a heart otherwise blackened with worry. "Did that open?"
"N-No… It's just like this one! It might as well be a wall because nobody is going through it anytime soon…"
"B-But there's nothing in there? Nothing like… what was in that classroom?"
"No," Anzu reassured her. "But you need to find a way to open this door, okay?"
"I-I can't! It's just like the other doors we found!"
The older girl was silent for a moment, and Shizuka almost thought she had truly lost her, but her voice piped up once again. "It opened before, right? There has to be a way!" There she was… with that unyielding optimism that made Shizuka want to scream. How did she manage to keep things from getting to her? "Shizuka, I hate to make you walk around this school on your own, but it seems like I have no choice. Can you try looking around? Maybe there's a key or some other way to get this door open. I'll look around here and try to find something to get out."
"But I'm scared…" Shizuka replied.
"I believe in you," her friend reassured her. However, those words sounded hollow and empty to the younger girl. Her mind couldn't accept that Anzu believed in her because her heart was so full of doubts she thought it could overflow.
"O-Okay…" The word was brought out of her by force because she didn't want to keep complaining, especially when her friend was trapped. So, in spite of her doubts, Shizuka resolved to soldier on.
Aaaand there ~
The problem with this chapter is that I started writing it in April and stopped in June, then came back to it a couple of days before I posted it here, so this chapter has been cooking for a while, but it may be a bit underwhelming, taking into consideration the time period in which I worked on it...